


Crow

by shreddedpatches



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Flashbacks, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Overdosing, Post-Reichenbach, Sibling Incest, Suicide, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 11:43:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 13,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4834094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shreddedpatches/pseuds/shreddedpatches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sebastian is not Jim.</p>
<p>Sebastian is teeth and tongue and hot breath.  His fingers tear into my sides and leave ragged marks in their wake.  Jim was rarely so brutal when fucking me—he liked me stainless, a porcelain doll.  Beautiful; breakable.  Sebastian seems determined to break me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Gone

This is not how it was supposed to end.

This is not how _we_ were supposed to end.

My brother lies below me, his skin three days cold.  His eyes are closed—held by glue—and his hands sit limply on his chest.  The casket is beautiful: a rich, brown wood, hand carved, and it cradles him gently.  He has been dressed lovingly in his Westwood suit, the accompanying tie now seeming like a cruel joke.  It’s fitting, though.  He loves that suit.

Loved.

I try to say something.  Tell him how much I love him, while I still have the chance.  Beg him to come back to me.  At least ask him why.  But the words are frozen, stuck in my mouth, just like the tears that refuse to fall from my eyes.  He deserves tears, and words. 

I cannot give him what he deserves.

\---

“He’s gone.”

The words are broken, ragged.  Confused and certain at the same time.  Their speaker looks as broken as they sound; his name is Sebastian, and I’ve met him before.  Just a few times, when he would come to our flat to drop off another box Jim wouldn’t let me touch.

We are seated at the island in the kitchen of Jim’s flat, an empty chair in between the ones we occupy.  Sebastian looks like he is about to collapse on the counter, his hands half-shielding his face from me.  I stare at him with big eyes and chew on a tuna sandwich to distract myself from the words.

_He’s gone._

I don’t understand yet.  Don’t understand, because Jim is a constant.  A necessity.  I could not exist in a world without him any more than I could exist in a world without oxygen, so I crinkle my eyebrows and say, “huh?” because surely, Sebastian somehow got it wrong.

“He—” Sebastian chokes on his words, turning his face away from me and biting his lip.  His hands move by themselves, grasping the air for some sort of explanation.

“Shot himself,” he finally manages.  “In the head.  I found him—”

Then Sebastian crumbles, his head hitting the countertop with a _thunk_ as he dissolves into quiet sobs.  His whole body trembles with the weight of what he has lost.

Jim had described him as an employee, but the look in his eyes tells me that there was more to it than that.  No one looks like that when their _boss_ dies.  No.  Sebastian looks like he was the one who had been shot when Jim pulled the trigger.  Shattered. 

I try not to think about what this means.

\---

Sebastian asks if I can help him plan the funeral.  I decline; Jim isn’t dead, so no funeral is necessary.

Sebastian then stares at me with scarred blue eyes, and I tremble. I’ve never seen eyes look so angry.  I’m worried that he will snap—that he will grab me by the throat the way another angry, grieving man once did years ago, that he will choke me until I lose consciousness.  But Sebastian is bigger than that, in the end; he simply turns to leave, hands shaking, and tells me that he’ll keep me informed as to when and where it will be.

\---

I show up to the funeral to prove Sebastian wrong.  Jim can’t be dead.  He just can’t be; as his twin, surely I would somehow be the first to know. 

The morning that Sebastian claimed Jim had died, Jim had left a note on our counter, but it was no suicide note.  _Good luck at your audition today!  You’ll do great.  I love you so much._   Not the words of a dead man.

As the first day, and then the second, slides by without any news from my brother, I begin to grow fearful, but I push it aside to the back of my mind.  It would be just like Jim to crash his own funeral.  I cling to that, ignoring the mounting feeling that my heart has been ripped in half.

\---

I soon recognize my mistake.  

The body in the box is undeniably his.  At first I can hardly recognize it—the pallor of his skin is off, and his face is slightly bloated.  It takes me a moment to remember that this is what death looks like.

The funeral is an awkward affair.  Those in attendance are the kind of people someone like Sebastian would know.  Employees, I guess, who show up more out of fear than love or respect and shuffle around awkwardly, trying to come up with something nice to say.  They stare at me like they’ve seen a ghost—me, the best-kept secret in the London underground—until they realize that I am an imperfect copy of their dead boss and am of no threat to them. 

The suit that I am wearing belongs to him.  I don’t have any of my own; I’ve never needed them before.  The stiff black fabric chafes against my skin when I move, so I stay as still as I can and try not to breathe.

Jim isn’t breathing.  Why should I be?

\---

Our small, forgotten town is caught between winter and spring.  The streets are covered in soggy snow, and for the first time in months, a handful of run-down cars are attempting to drive on the unsafe ground.  The sidewalks are hardly better than the streets, but we don’t have a choice: Da didn’t pick us up from school again, the same way he didn’t pick us up yesterday and won’t pick us up tomorrow. 

Jim and I are used to it.  Now that the worst of winter is over, it isn’t as bad.  Walking home in the darkening twilight is far more merciful than attempting to navigate the unforgiving pitch black that confronted us in January.  I occasionally slip on the slush on the uneven sidewalk, but Jim immediately extends a hand to catch me before I fall.  In return, I fumble through my pockets to find the candy I got earlier in the nurse’s office and hand it to him.  He says he doesn’t want it, but I know he does, so I split the small chocolate bar in half, and we chew in a happy silence, holding hands.

Ahead is a small black shape, laying on the edge of the sidewalk like a rag somebody left behind.  I realize it is a crow when we get closer.  One of its wings has been smashed and the feathers stick out at impossible angles.    

I don’t know what to do, so I look up at Jim and say his name, because he always has the answers.  “Jim, what do we do?”

“There’s nothing to do,” he replies, his head cocked to the side.  “It’s already dead, Richard.”

“But we—we can’t just leave him here,” I protest.  “He might get run over by a car, or eaten by a dog, or something.”

“Alright,” Jim pauses.  “Then…we could take him home with us.”

“And have a funeral for him?”

“Sure.”  Jim nods decisively, and I bend down to scoop the bird up.  He is deceptively light in my hands.  I can’t feel his feathers through the thin gloves protecting my fingers, but I am sure if I were to touch them that they would be wonderfully soft, even in death.

We won’t be home for another hour.  Above us, the sky is on fire, streaked with oranges and reds and thick black clouds, and the shadows on the ground inch closer to our feet with every passing moment.  Our cheap shoes aren’t waterproof, and the slush has seeped through our socks and frozen our toes.  I clutch the crow closer to my chest, hoping to keep myself a little warmer.  The most childish part of me hopes that this will somehow keep the crow warm as well.

Jim read a book on birds once, and he’s rattling off everything he can remember about crows to keep us distracted from the cold.  “Crows live on every continent except Antarctica and South America. In medieval times, crows were thought to predict the future.  Crows are very social and live in huge groups, especially in winter.  A group of crows is called a murder.” 

His teeth are trembling behind every word he says, but he presses on, and I don’t mind.  “Crows have been known to attack birds much larger than themselves, including birds of prey like golden eagles.  They’re really brave, and smart.  Crows can count to six and can use tools.  They take care of their own when injured, but they have also been known to kill other crows for no reason.”

His wealth of knowledge exhausted, Jim quiets and shivers in the cold.  He’s been stealing glances of the crow the as we’ve walked, and I wonder if maybe he would like to hold him.  “Can you take him for a bit?” I ask, careful to phrase the question so Jim can feel like he’s helping his little brother, even though I wouldn’t mind holding the crow for the rest of the walk home.

“Sure,” Jim says, nodding and holding out his hands.  He cradles the crow in his arms, absentmindedly stroking it.  It seems strangely natural to see my brother holding something dead.  They look peaceful together.

“I wonder if he has a family,” I ask.

“Had,” Jim said softly, pulling the crow closer to him.  “Most likely,” he says after he’s had a moment to mull the question over.  “Most crows mate for life.  I doubt he left any young children behind, though.  Crow eggs hatch in the spring.”

“Oh,” I say.  I want to add something else, but the words aren’t there, so we lapse into silence again and march onward.

\---

Sebastian stands at the front of the room.  His voice breaks as he speaks, and he keeps stopping mid-sentence to run his hands over his face and gulp down breaths.  He is speaking softly—he can hardly manage much else—and from my position towards the back of the room, I can hardly hear what he is saying.

I can’t imagine what he could possibly be saying, either.  The Jim he must have known—that everyone in the room but me must have known—couldn’t have been one that deserved kind words at his passing.

When he is done speaking, Sebastian manages to lift his eyes to the room and look around, asking if anyone else has anything they would like to add.  The other men in the room shiver, spineless, and suddenly I can tell Sebastian is looking directly at me. 

I try to stand up and walk to the front of the room, but I can’t.  The things I wish to say to Jim—I can’t say them, not in front of these men who didn’t even know him.  So I collapse back into the unforgiving pew and try to cry, and even that I can’t manage. 

There is nothing I can do, it seems, without him.


	2. Limbs

The only sound is our feet crunching against the wet snow on the ground.  It’s almost dark, even though it’s barely five o’clock, and the only source of light is the ancient lampposts on the side of the road.  Every time the road lights up with the headlights of a passing car, we flinch, terrified that the driver might be our father, but luck seems to be on our side tonight, and we make it home before he does.

Our yard is a generous size, considering our neighborhood, and we make our way to the backyard before realizing we have nothing for digging a grave.  We don’t know where our father put Mam’s gardening tools, so I hurry inside and grab two silver spoons while Jim stays and cradles the crow. 

We wordlessly agree to bury the crow beneath Mam’s apple tree, the one that stopped baring fruits two years ago.  “Maybe the crow will make the apples come back,” I mumble as I dig.  Other than that, we are silent.  The spoons are small and can’t shovel dirt quickly, and the ground, which has been frozen all winter, doesn’t want to give way.  Our hands are cold, and gripping the quickly chilling handle of the spoons seems like it will quickly be an impossible task.

With our combined efforts, however, the grave is complete in a reasonable amount of time.  I lay the crow into it, then look at Jim, unsure of what to do next.

We shuffle close to the grave and sit, our hands in our lap.  Jim begins the ceremony with a few short words.  “Dear Crow, you were a good crow.  Your flock will miss you.”

“I’m sorry that you had to die before your time,” I add, sure that the cause of the crow’s death was some manmade tragedy, however small. 

“We promise to come and visit you in our yard.  We gave you a grave underneath our Mam’s apple tree.”

“It’s not a very good grave,” I admit, “but we hope you like it anyway.”

“If the tree produces any apples this year, we’ll give you one somehow.”

We don’t really know what else to say.  Our words aren’t enough to make up for the loss of the crow, so we stare at the black body in the shallow grave.  It started snowing again a while ago, and a few small flakes stick out against the crow’s dark feathers.

I reach for Jim’s hand and clear my throat.  “Do you think I can maybe pray for him?”

I’ve known for a while now that Jim doesn’t really believe in God, even though he’s never said anything about it to me.  I suppose he’s found it difficult to put faith in the same deity that our father cites whenever his hands come down upon us, and I don’t want to ruin this for him by letting that same God into our small service.  But Jim nods after a moment of hesitation, and I do my best to remember one of the prayers from our mother’s funeral.  It has been a while since her passing and there were a lot of prayers; I know that whatever I say, I am sure to get it wrong somehow. 

The prayer I finally remember is meant for a mother, not a crow, so I make a few modifications where I can.  “O God,” I say, my voice barely able to support itself in the cold, “in Thy mercy have pity on the soul of this crow, and forgive him his trespasses; and let him see his friends again in the joy of everlasting brightness.  Through Christ our Lord, Amen.”

“Amen,” Jim echoes, his eyes fixed on the crow.  The only answer from God is the silence of the falling snow, and with that we conclude that the ceremony is over and that we have done what we can.  Quickly, we scoop dirt over the crow’s body before hurrying inside to strip off our dirtied uniforms before our father has a chance to see what we have done.

\---

“Richard,” he whispers, shaking me awake.  His voice is insistent, but then it usually is, so I press my head back into the pillow and grumble about it being three in the morning.

It’s been like this for weeks.  He’ll be gone for days and then will turn up in the middle of the night to shake me awake and press me against the bed.  On the days he bothers to stay, he hardly talks to me.  Says he’s finishing something up, something about that television stunt.  As if breaking into the Tower of London and going on trial can be brushed away as a _stunt_. 

I try to ignore it.  Jim can do what he wants.

 _“Richard,”_ he repeats, and this time I blink and pull myself up to greet him.  Our bedroom is dark, lit only by the street lights from below, but I can still tell that Jim looks disheveled and dirty.   Of course, he decided to borrow some of my clothes to go tramping through a garbage heap or whatnot.  Heaven forbid he soil that precious Westwood.

“It’s really late,” I mumble.  “I have an audition tomorrow.”  Not like he cares.  Not like he could ever take the time to care about anything of mine, these days.

“I know.  I’m sorry, it’s just—this is really important, okay?”

It’s the first time I’ve heard Jim stutter in years, but I brush it off.  It’s too hard to ignore the anger that’s been building in me over the past month.  Months.

“You have a hand, don’t you?” I ask, rolling over and preparing to go back to sleep.

“Richard, _please_.” He pauses, sucks in air. “I need you right now.”

Jim—beautiful, unbreakable Jim—sounds shattered.  Always the dutiful little brother, I give in.  “What do you need?” I whisper, turning around to face him. 

He says nothing, so I crawl closer to him and wrap my arms around him tenderly.  He folds into me, resting his forehead against mine, and I lean in and press my lips against his, because this is usually what he wants when he says nothing.  What we both want, really: to close the mistake of a gap between our bodies until we are what we were meant to be.

His lips taste sad again, and I do my best to suck the poison out.  What I can do isn’t enough to fix him, though, I know.

I know my role, so I take my hand and slide it down to his legs.  He climbed into bed still wearing a pair of jeans, jeans which I am fairly certain belong to me, and I make it my mission to remove them as quickly as possible.  I can’t help but laugh when I think back to the first time we did this, when our every movement was tainted with teenage uncertainty and the fear of unforgivable sin.

We needed it, though—needed our bodies to crash together like this.  And we need it now.

Finally all our clothes have disappeared and we are thrashing together in the only way we know how.  Jim’s hands are impossibly gentle against my skin, and I do my best to replicate the kindness.  Maybe it’s a mistake: maybe it’s hostility that he needs right now.  Maybe he needs someone to tear him apart. 

I could never be that for him.

\---

I touch him and we are fifteen.  Young and stupid, looking for something in each other to fill up the empty holes inside of us. 

I have climbed into his bed again.  Earlier that night, our father let his drunken fists rain down on my skin before he stumbled from the house.  He mistook me for Jim, but I didn’t bother correcting him.  Better me than my brother.

I am a whimpering, pathetic mess, clinging to my brother for some sort of salvation.  He runs his hand down the damaged parts of my back and smooths his fingers through my hair, and I curl into the touch like an infant.  “It’s going to be okay,” he whispers, and even though I know it’s a lie, I still manage to believe him.

“It hurts,” I sob, even though Jim already knows.  I just can’t think of anything else.  It’s shameful, really: this has happened over and over, but every time feels like the first.

“I know,” Jim says quietly, and he pulls me closer to him.  “One day, I’m going to make him pay for this.  I promise.”

I have no way of knowing that those words mean murder, but if I had known, I’m not sure if I would have cared.  In my ignorance, I look at him and try to say something, but I end up collapsing into tears again.

Jim gives me another too-kind stare and presses his lips against my forehead, like our Mam used to.   The touch is incredibly tender, and I dig my fingers into Jim’s shirt and try to focus on the feeling of Jim’s mouth on my skin to calm down. 

Jim’s lips are everywhere: my forehead, my eyelids, my cheeks.  Finally, I feel my breathing calm, and I lean into the light kisses, kisses that feel like they’re the only thing keeping me alive.  Jim always knows just what to do.

When his lips find mine, it’s hardly a surprise.  It’s not my first kiss, and it’s hardly his first, either, but it’s the first time that a kiss has been anything more than an excess of hormones to me.  His mouth is dangerously soft, and the gentle squeezes of his lips articulate his concern for me in a way words never could.  The pain of an hour ago is all but forgotten between his hands running down my back and his tongue sliding into my mouth. 

“Jim,” I whisper, embarrassed at how desperate I sound.  All he did was kiss me.  “I—”

I don’t really know what I’m trying to say.  I tell myself that I’m about to reprimand him for touching me in a way that should be reserved for husband and wife, but I know that isn’t anything close to the truth.  Maybe I’m about to deny my deepest sin—to insist that I’ve never thought about him like this.  To pretend that I’m a good Catholic boy who’s never let his mind wander to his brother when sucking off older boys in drug-infested alleyways like a whore.  Who’s never felt a rush of jealousy when walking in on Jim fondling another girl in the living room again.  But it’s pointless: Jim looks at me and I know he _knows_. 

“I’m sorry.  I’ve wanted to do that for a really long time,” he confesses, pretending like he can’t meet my eyes.  “I—we don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

I look at him and tell him I want everything.

\---

That was years ago.  Tonight, it’s over quickly—not because we are overwhelmed with lust, but because there isn’t enough of it.  Neither one of us can stay focused, and our arousal quickly fades—mine from exhaustion, Jim’s from something less tangible.

“I’m sorry,” Jim mumbles, embarrassed. “I—It’s not you.” 

“It’s fine,” I reply, reaching out to stroke his arm.  “There’s always next time.”

The words were meant to be comforting, but something about them makes Jim break down, sobbing.  His body has forgotten how to cry, and he noisily chokes on air and releases a broken, ragged sound that scares me. 

I don’t remember how to help him.  At first I can only stare, struck by the novelty of a display that would normally come from me.  When I come back to myself, I try to get close to him, very aware of my nakedness, so that I can hold him the way our Mam used to when we cried.

“It’s okay,” I whisper, unaware of the lie in the words.  I run my fingers through his messy hair and try to remember some of Mam’s old lullabies.

“It’s not,” he replies hoarsely.  “Richard, I—”

The rest of his confession is drowned out by sobs. 


	3. Silence

It’s not until I get home from the funeral that I understand what he was trying to say three nights ago and couldn’t.  Jim came to me as a dying man suffocated by the weight of the world.  And I almost turned him away.

I wonder if what I did for him was really any better.  _I should have known_ , I think, collapsing into the living room couch and tearing off the black suit that isn’t mine.  _Should have seen it coming.  Should have—_

The should-haves hardly matter now, but they’re stuck to me.  Looking back, the death is obvious.  The silence, the restlessness.  The absence in his stares when he looked at me.  And finally, the words— _I need you right now_.  Words like the world was crumbling, and I couldn’t hear it.

My brother is gone and it’s my fault.  My brother is gone and I did nothing for him—couldn’t even hold a funeral for him, leaving that task to someone who didn’t share his blood.  Sebastian had his eyes on me during the funeral.  Those cold, angry blue eyes.  Surely my face was an insult to him.

He spoke to me when it was over, when Jim’s body had been reclaimed by the earth.  Five words, low and loathing. 

“It should have been you.”

Then he turned and walked away.

I push my face into the back of the couch and let out a sob.  If Jim were still here, he would wrap his arms around me and hold me until the tears were gone, but Jim is not here, so I wrap a brown blanket around myself instead.  The blanket is more of an insult than a comfort; it smells like Jim, and that only makes the tears come faster.

 _It should have been you._  

Jim came to me on his last night and I didn’t save him.  I wonder frantically how things might have turned out if it had been Sebastian that he had gone to instead.  Maybe Sebastian would have understood the sadness in him.  Would have been able to push away his own darkness to help Jim.  Would have at least have been able to hold him down and take him to a hospital, whereas I—

I couldn’t do anything.  Didn’t do anything.

And now Jim is dead.

\---

The penthouse feels much too big without him.  I stumble around it, looking for some sort of clue of what to do with myself now.  He has left nothing for me, though, it seems.  The rooms I was never allowed in before are unlocked, empty.  Dead.  I had glimpsed their contents, before—monitors and crates of messy files and equations scrawled all over the walls in black ink.  They couldn’t have been cleared out so easily.

How had I not noticed? 

I stand in his old computer room, the one where the equations were written on walls now painted white.  The paint is insulting, erasing the life that used to be here.  Before I understand what I am doing, I am clawing at the walls, trying to scrape the layers of paint off to reveal what I knew must be underneath.  Something of Jim’s, something for me to keep.  Maybe if I scratched enough of the white away, it would be like Jim was alive again.

My movements are frantic and determined, scraping at where I had once seen the writing, but the white is relentless.  No matter how much I scrape off, there’s no black underneath.  Instead, there is red. 

It takes far too long for me to realize that it’s my blood.  I have scraped at the paint for so long that my fingers are bleeding, the nails torn and ragged.  I stare at my ruined fingers and the sobs return, and then I am leaning against the wall and crying.  The tears I was unable to cry at the funeral fall from my face and mix with the blood on the wall, but it’s not enough to wash the red away.

\---

I burrow into the bed with no intention of ever leaving it.  My body heat alone is not enough to warm it, and I am soon shivering.  Wrapping the blankets around myself more tightly does little to help; neither does pulling on extra socks and shirts.  After a while I just give up and surrender to the cold.

The bed still smells like him.  Like us.  I push my face into his pillow and let the smell suffocate me, pretending that I’m pressing my face into his chest the way I used to when we were children, comforting one another.  For a moment, the illusion works: the pillow is his body, the bedsheets his limbs, my breathing enough for the both of us.  I’m an actor, after all.  I’m great at playing pretend.

But I’m not great enough to bring him back from the dead.  The weight of his death creeps up on me again and I clutch the pillow even harder.  I don’t understand how I can be expected to survive without him—my whole life, Jim has been everything. 

We always thought of ourselves as one whole, broken in two in some terrible, wonderful mistake.  He took the head, and I took the heart.  Together, one. 

Now that he is gone, I am not arrogant enough to think of myself as our heart.  My body feels numb, immobile.  Dead.  My brother shot himself in the head and he killed me.  If I was the one keeping us alive, this couldn’t have happened.

He was the protector.  My protector.  The things he did—to build a world where we could live together as one, in secrecy and safety—wore him down.  It was my job, then, to be the caretaker: to kiss him all better, to give him the unconditional love and forgiveness of a God he turned away from long ago, and I played my part flawlessly.  He told me so. 

But he lied. 

It is only now, as I lie in _his_ bed in _his_ home in _his_ city that I understand that I was a parasite, eating him alive.  For years I slept in his bed and ate his food and his flesh and offered nothing in return—nothing but damning kisses from a mouth too familiar to be trusted.  And he did nothing to stop it.  Nothing, because he loved me despite it all—despite my uselessness.   

Then one day he grew too sick from all I had consumed, and he died. 

I sob into the emptiness of the bedroom, trying and failing to choke out his name.  I manage to cry out _why_ in a pathetic whine in between my tears, but I don’t expect an answer.  His mouth was sewn shut by the funeral director.

The silence in the bedroom is soft, and it stares at me in the same sad way that Jim used to whenever I cried.  Even in death, I swear I can feel him in the bed with me.  But he isn’t there, so I cry and let the silence rock me to sleep.


	4. Follower

The cereal turns to ash in my mouth, but it’s the only thing I can bring myself to eat.  Food doesn’t make sense anymore—I can hardly keep it down.  At least the cereal, made mushy by milk, doesn’t hurt when I throw it back up. 

Going to rehearsals doesn’t make sense anymore, either.  Neither does personal hygiene—I haven’t bothered to shower or shave regularly since the funeral, and a thin layer of stubble has cropped up on my cheeks.  My hair is greasy and my mouth is musty and that’s just how things are now.  Jim is dead; I’m a wreck.  Whatever.

I managed to stumble out of our flat once, when the refrigerator ran out of food.  In only a matter of weeks, the place I had once called home had grown cold and foreign.  I guess I expected the city to slow down, mourning the death of its king, but it didn’t—cars still screamed and traffic lights still winked and pedestrians still soldiered on and the homeless still starved and roadkill still died on the side of the street.  It had been maybe a month, and London had already forgotten Moriarty.

But I can’t forget.  To me, Jim is everywhere.  He’s in the few stars bright enough to hang over the Thames when the clouds are gone, in the raindrops flooding the streets when they aren’t.  He’s in high-end suit jackets and cigarette smoke and insincere smiles, in kids too young to be dealing crack in alleyways overlooked by the police.  He’s in drunk lovers, stumbling and holding hands; he’s in muggings and murders, in car crashes with paramedics running around trying to save lives that have already been lost.  He’s in everything brushed away as an accident, in all that burns too bright and too beautiful to last. 

\---

We are twenty-three.  Jim is finishing up his doctorate in Applied Mathematics at Oxford; I am waiting tables at a local diner between acting gigs.  Two weeks ago, we moved into a new apartment together.  It’s small, but it’s in a much safer part of the city and has space for what we need.  Jim’s telescope and computer, my Shakespeare and scarf collections, a bed for the both of us—it all fits. 

I asked him where the money came from, once—with him at school, we should be too broke to move.  But he smiled and asked if I trusted him and I said yes and that was that.

Thunder cracks in the distance, and I wake up, panting.  The loud noise reawakens my childhood fear of other loud noises closer to home, and I move to Jim’s side of the bed, seeking comfort in his arms. 

But his side of the bed is empty and cold.  The thunder rumbles again, and I whimper.  I need—I need him. 

I scramble from the bed and start flipping on the lights as quickly as I can.  The flat isn’t big; it shouldn’t be that hard to find Jim, if he’s here.  But he’s not at his desk working late again and he’s not in the bathroom or the kitchen and there isn’t a note on the counter saying where he went and the thunder is getting louder and he isn’t saying anything when I call out his name and he’s gone and his shoes are still here but he’s probably gone and I tripped over over one of his stupid stacks of textbooks lying on the floor and he’s gone, he’s gone, he’s never coming back because he’s gone—

Lightning flashes, closer this time, and there’s just enough light to make out a lone figure leaning on the balcony railing.  Jim. 

I fling the sliding glass door open forcefully.  “Jim, what are you _doing?_ ”

He pauses before answering, and when he does, his voice is so quiet that the rain almost drowns it out.  “It’s so wet out here,” he says.  “Do you think the rain would wash the blood away before morning if I jumped?”

His words startle me into silence.  “Jim?” I ask again, starting to wonder if the thunder is the thing I really need to fear.

This time he turns around, smiling in the way only I ever get to see.  “Richard, what are you doing up?”

“I, um.”  The way he redirects the conversation feels like whiplash, but Jim is the leader and I am the follower, so I do my best to keep up.  “The thunder woke me.”

“Oh, Richie,” he laughs, and the sound is beautiful and warm and feels like home.  “Are you scared?”  I don’t bother with an answer, because he knows—he knows me inside and out. 

“Come here,” he says softly, holding a hand out for me.  I take it, and it’s slick with the cold of the rain, but there’s warmth underneath, warmth that belongs to him.  He pulls me gently from the apartment onto the balcony, and my feet slide uncertainly on the wet concrete.  We are both barefoot, I notice; I, for one, didn’t expect that I would be going outside so late at night, and Jim…is Jim.

“It’s not so bad, see?”  He holds me flush against his body, and the wet from his shirt starts soaking through mine.  I can feel him—feel his heartbeat thrumming gently in his chest, feel his breath warm on my cheek.  He feels alive.

“I guess not,” I answer, although really I’m not sure.  I love being this close to him, but the thunder still cracks in the distance and the rain is cold against my skin.  I don’t see how this could ever be better than inside, where it’s safe.

“You mean you don’t be- _lieve_ me?” he asks in that sing-song voice of his, and then he’s moving—guiding me in some strange rendition of a waltz.  Jim has never taken dance classes, so he doesn’t technically know what he’s doing, but like everything else he does, his movements are graceful and self-assured and a little difficult to follow.  But I try—I lean into him and let him pull me this way and that, trusting him.

I want him to know that I’m his, so I rest my head on his shoulder and bury my face in his neck.  He seems to like this—I can hear him chuckle, and then start to hum something that I only barely recognize.

“Jim, you’re crazy,” I murmur, because he is—dancing in a storm in the middle of the night, humming away like it’s nothing.  He just laughs and kisses my neck.

“What song is it, Richie?  I know you know.”  Then he’s back to humming, and I focus on the sound of his voice, wanting to be a good boy, to answer his question.  The soft, melancholy notes of the classic melody gently curve upwards, and that’s when it clicks.  Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” the first movement. 

Instead of answering, I start to hum the harmony into his neck, filling in the gaps left by his voice.  He pulls me closer and starts to turn me faster, and keeping up is no challenge for me—finally we are in synch, matching each other’s movements perfectly, the way we were meant to.

He’s tapping the melody into my back with his fingers and the rain’s still coming down on us but I hardly notice anymore and our movements are perfectly aligned and it’s leaving me breathless and I’m so in love with him that I can’t think anymore.  He’s—he’s perfect.

We reach the end of the song and it’s unclear who should take the last two deep, final notes, so we both do, humming them at exactly the same time.  It’s incredible, because we didn’t rehearse this and didn’t need to.  I take my head off his shoulder and look into his eyes and I’m trembling because he’s so wonderful and he’s my brother and I love him so much.

“Are you still scared?” he asks, pushing the wet hair clinging to my forehead out of the way so he can see me better.  I shake my head no and give him a smile.  It’s all I can manage—I’m too overwhelmed, too in love to speak.

“Good,” he whispers, his lips close to mine.  “We’d have to go through the rest of the movements if you were.”  He rewards me with a kiss to my cheek and leads me inside to the bathroom, where we shed our damp clothes and towel off until the water is gone and we are reasonably warm. 

We slide into bed without clothes because there is no shame between us.  I crawl towards him and lie as close to him as I can, and he traces comforting circles on my back with his fingertips and presses soft kisses into my neck.  “Thank you,” he murmurs.

“For what?” I ask, confused.  But he just keeps kissing me and doesn’t answer.

\---

Now I stand on a different balcony, alone.  The city spreads out at my feet, frantically pulsing with calamity of everyday life.  Somewhere, a siren wails.  Someone’s probably dying.  I can’t bring myself to care.

It’s raining.  I’m hunched over the corner of the balcony railing, shivering from the wet.  I never understood how Jim could stand in the rain like this and feel nothing.  The water has soaked through my thin shirt and turned my arms to gooseflesh, but then, that was rather the point. 

Out here, I can’t hear myself cry.  The soft lapping against metal and glass and skin drowns out my sobs.  Water runs down my face—cold like death, mixing with the warmth of my tears.  The clash of hot and cold is making me lose track of reality.  My brother is gone.  My brother is here.  Raindrops hit my face and he’s kissing me. 

I never would have thought raindrops felt like kisses, before he died.

I curl over and clutch my chest and let out another ragged wail.  The wail turns to sobs and the sobs turn to chokes and then I’m a broken mess on the concrete of the balcony, curling into a ball and scratching at the hard cement.  I cry louder and louder because I just want him to hear me, wherever he is.  I want him to know that he’s missed.

The cement of the balcony is unforgiving, but the rain runs down my face and my neck and takes away the harshness, leaving only cold.  The hard concrete and soft water makes me feel suspended between another pair of opposites, and I think of cemeteries and coffins and the peace within them.  It would be like coming home.

My mother is dead.  My brother is dead.  My father is dead, too.  I don’t understand why I’ve been left alive.

\---

Later that evening, I’m sitting at the island in the kitchen again, and this time I’m not alone—a mostly-full bottle of pills and a few shots of whiskey are keeping me company.  It’s not surprising to me that, in the end, it would come to this.  Jim is gone; of course I’m going to follow after.  There’s nothing left for me here.

I take the little white pills one at a time, waiting for a sign to make me change my mind and put off death for another day.  But nothing happens.  There’s no knock at the door, no ping of a text.  Rain drums against the huge glass windowpanes Jim used to love, and my drug-addled mind thinks that it sounds like forgiveness.  I pray that God can understand that I couldn’t keep living when half of me was already dead.

The whiskey burns like acid in my mouth.  I’ve never been a fan of the drink, but I hope it will help poison me softly so I swallow it all the same.  The heat of it curls in my stomach and then spreads outwards, warming frozen limbs.  I feel like I’m burning up and it’s so nice to feel this way after a month of feeling dead inside.  _Should have done this sooner,_ I think, pouring myself another shot with unsteady hands.

When I have had my fill, I stumble around the apartment looking for something to do to pass whatever time I have left.  My body feels light but my head feels much too heavy and I keep running into things that are closer than they seem.  There’s nothing really left for me to do, I decide, so I trip over my feet until I make it to our bedroom and curl up in sheets that don’t smell like him anymore.  I like knowing that I’ll die in the last place that we were together.  It seems fitting, somehow.

I can finally feel the medication taking its toll on me.  I am heavy and sluggish and warm, and I’m glad I made it here—to my final resting place—before I couldn’t walk anymore.  I close my eyes and think of him.  I’ll see him soon, I hope, wherever he is.  I hope he forgives me for not being strong enough to live without him.  I know he’ll understand why. 

I think of his body—lying cold in a grave I never managed to visit after his funeral.  I wonder what he looks like now.  If his beautiful brown eyes are still there, underneath the eyelids held shut with glue, or if they’re gone, eaten by maggots.  If the chemicals from the embalming have preserved him at all, or if he’s a dried out, withered husk of what once was.  I never understood death as well as he did, so I have no way of knowing what he might look like after being gone for a month.  I don’t really care, either.  No matter what, he’s more beautiful than anything else in the world because he’s my brother and I belong to him.

I want to be with him.  Want to lie down in his grave, want our bodies to twist together as they decay until we are dust and it’s impossible to tell where one of us begins and the other ends.  Want it so badly that I can feel it as a physical pain stabbing through the haze of whiskey, and then I’m scrambling, reaching for the phone that I’ve abandoned somewhere at our bedside table.

I squint at the brightness of the screen and fumble my way through recent messages, ignoring frantic are-you-okays from troupe members and a few angry texts from my director before coming across what I am looking for: a few short lines giving the address for Jim’s funeral from a number without a name.  Sebastian.

It doesn’t make sense to text him now, and maybe if there were less drugs in my system I would have realized that.  I don’t like him and he doesn’t like me and he certainly has no reason to do anything I ask, but I’m drunk and I’m dying and I can’t think straight, so I type out a feeble message with shaky fingers and hope he gets it in the morning.

_pllease  bury .me witj  him if yoy cam. i thin.k  he would want ittoo.._

Then I let the phone drop beside me and roll over.  That’s the best I can do, with my ability to move eaten away by medication, and I pray that Sebastian has the grace to grant me this favor even if I am undeserving.  It’s not about me, really.  It’s about Jim, too.  We were meant to be together, always.  And this way we will be.

Between the alcohol and the blankets, I am finally warm and at peace.  I can’t imagine a happier way to die.  I hope that Jim had just a fraction of this peace when he pulled the trigger.  I want that for him. 

“I’m coming home, Jim,” I whisper into the darkness.  Then I close my eyes and smile.


	5. Sebastian

I open my eyes and I’m still in our bed.  It smells fresh now—like every trace of Jim has been washed away.  My head is throbbing, but other than that, I seem fine.  If this is Hell, I think slowly, then the Devil is far cleverer than I expected.

But it’s not Hell—I’m not stupid.  By some unhappy miracle, I’m still alive.  I groan and close my eyes and try to fall back asleep.  Maybe next time I wake up, I’ll actually be dead.

There are quiet footsteps coming down the hall, and then I’m not alone in the room anymore.  Sebastian stares at me: arms crossed, eyes hard.

What the fuck is _he_ doing here?

I ask him just as much with a voice made rough from days of sleep, and he keeps glaring at me before answering in a voice just as rough as mine.  “What the fuck are you doing, trying to off yourself?”  His words are hot, but his voice is cold, betraying how little he actually cares about what I do.

“The fuck do you care?” I ask, because I know he doesn’t.  He practically wished me dead at the funeral. 

He stares at me with those cold eyes and I roll over and bury my head into a pillow to escape them.  “Jim texted me before…you know.  Told me to make sure you’d be okay.”

“Fantastic job you’ve been doing,” I scoff, pushing my head further into the pillow in an attempt to sooth the throbbing headache between my eyes.

He doesn’t say anything.  I hear him shifting around the room, and when I look up from my nest in the bed, I find him sitting in Jim’s favorite armchair, staring off into space.  Seeing him in Jim’s chair makes me boil with anger, and I almost tell him to get out of it, but he looks so worn out that I let him stay there.  Temporarily, anyway.

“Well, you can go now,” I tell him.  “I don’t want you here.”

“That’s not your decision to make,” he says, sounding absolutely thrilled at the prospect of staying another moment in this room.  “But judging by how all you’ve done since you’ve woken up this time is smart off to me, I’d say you’re probably well enough to be left on your own.”

I blink, sit up in the bed.  The quick movement leaves my head throbbing, and I wince. “This time?”

“Yeah,” Sebastian says, shrugging.  “You’ve been sleeping on and off for the last two days, metabolizing the drugs.  I was going to take you to a hospital, but the doc said you’d be fine.  Don’t want you getting arrested on account of your face, you know?”  He forces a laugh, trying to lighten the mood, but it doesn’t help.

“There was a doctor?” I ask.  My mind, still heavy with drugs, doesn’t quite understand what he’s trying to tell me.

“Jim’s…private physician,” he says, his words shaking.  “The one he, um, sent us to when we didn’t want to answer questions.”

It’s strange to see such a big, strong man falling to pieces like this.  Jim must have been very important to him, I think.  The thought doesn’t feel like it belongs to me.  The drugs have rendered it cold, observant, detached.

“I washed your sheets,” Sebastian mumbles, trying to break the silence.  His mouth opens like he’s going to add something, but he decides against it.  I know I should thank him, but I don’t want to, because washing the sheets means washing Jim away.  So I say nothing.

“Well, I guess I’ll be going,” he says, getting out of the chair and moving towards the doorway, his back towards me.  “Let me know if you need anything.” 

I don’t know what to say to that, either.  I just needed him to bury me with my brother and he couldn’t even do that for me.  I don’t plan on asking him for help again.

Sebastian pauses, turning to face me again and fixing me with those cold, hard eyes, and I am back at the funeral, shivering in a suit that doesn’t belong to me.  “And Richard?  One more thing.”

His voice is low and full of restrained anger.  I know, because I’ve heard that kind of voice before.  All I can do is swallow and tremble.

“Don’t do that to yourself again.  You’re all that’s left of him.”

Then he’s gone.

\---

He leaves me alone in the silence and the dark where I belong.  I get up to get a glass of water and a wet washcloth before heading back to the bed and curling up to nurse the angry ache in my head.

Some memories managed to cut through the fog of the drugs.  Now that I am alone, they are forcing themselves upon me.  Inhaling chunks of vomit, hardly able to move.  Suffocating.  Tears.  Alone.

Sebastian, hands cool on my feverish skin.  Gentle as he washes me, pulling chunks of dried cereal from my hair. 

Where’s Jim, I asked, forgetting that my brother had put a bullet in his head.  Where’s Jim, I cried, sobbed, screamed.

_Jim isn’t here right now.  No, I didn’t do anything to him.  He told me to take care of you.  Get back into bed, Richard.  It’s going to be okay._

The memories choke me.  I don’t want to think that anyone—other than Jim—has seen me that vulnerable.  Especially him.

He was so patient, so calm.  I didn’t deserve it but he was there anyway, keeping me safe.  I wonder briefly if this is what Jim saw in him.  His ability to give and give, his calm under pressure.  Things I certainly don’t have.

I throw up in the bed again.  This time, Sebastian isn’t here to wash my sheets for me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the shortest chapter ever! This segment didn't fit well with the stuff that came before it or will come after it, so I needed to post it by itself. 
> 
> I'm all out of buffer and am struggling to find times to write, so updates won't be on any regular schedule. But stay with me, guys! I'm determined to finish this one. No, really, I am.
> 
> Next chapter should be up within the next two weeks. See you then! xx


	6. Liar, Liar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize to the two or three people who might still be interested in this fic for taking so dreadfully long to update it. My world sort of turned itself on its head since October, and I've been trying to sort of put things back in order, but it doesn't matter. Excuses, excuses: this is long overdue. That's how fanfiction goes, I guess. Sorry, my dears. I'll try harder in the future.
> 
> This chapter is dedicated to the lovely 99MillionMiles, who had the guts to ask for me to update this even though it had been eight months since it had been touched. Ask and you shall (eventually) receive, my dear. This one's for you.

The weeks slide by—one, two, three, four, five.  Soon they melt into months and then I am stranded in the middle of January with no one to hold me, keep me warm.  

Life without Jim is dry, stale.  I think about going back to acting again, just for something to piss away the time—I even meet up with my old troupemates a few weeks before Christmas, but being around such normal people is suffocating.  They laugh and ask how I have been, what am I doing now, and I look at them with dead eyes and tell them that my brother shot himself in the head.

“Oh,” they say,  For a precious second, their happiness is gone.

“I’m so sorry,” one whispers, more to the cheap beer in front of her than to me.

“You never said anything about having a brother,” another says, eyebrows folded in more curiosity than concern.

Then the moment is over and they are laughing again—this garrulous, oppressive _normal_ —and for the first time in my life, I understand why Jim had no problem ending innocent lives.  When the evening is over, they smile and tell me to call them again in a week and I smile even wider and promise I will. 

Lying, I decide, has never been so fun.

\---

The nightclub smells like sweat and piss and people fucking in the bathroom because its occupants are sweating and pissing and fucking in the bathroom.  Drinks are twenty-five percent off tonight, and the place is packed with lonely blokes looking to score.  One of them, a stocky brunette with an undercut and an octopus tattoo on his right arm, has pulled me to the dance floor and is sucking on my neck while I roll my eyes and grind on him anyway.  I lean my head back until it is resting on his shoulder and moan into his ear; he tightens his grip on my hips instantly.  Pathetic, really.

He says something, tries to croon it into my ear to get me hard, but I can’t hear him over the generic techno music blasting in the background.  When I don’t respond, he repeats himself, shouting into my ear this time: “How’d a pretty thing like you end up in a place like this?”

I laugh—a sharp, cold noise angry enough to betray just how jaded I really am.  “How’s anyone en’ up in a place like this?” I answer, my words slurring together after only a few drinks.  I’ve been doing this almost every night for a month and a half, and I still have the tolerance of a fifteen-year-old girl trying to party with kids three years her senior. 

Drunk Prick with Tattoos laughs like it’s the cleverest thing he’s heard all night, which is especially amusing to me since it’s the response I always give to men like him in clubs like this.  “Rough breakup?” he asks knowingly, using the question as an opportunity to slide one of his hands from my hips to my inner thigh.

“You don’ know how rough.”  Breakup, suicide.  All the same shit in the end.

Drunk Prick makes a noise of mock-sympathy and runs his hand up and down my stomach.  “I’d never treat you like that, baby,” he says, licking the inside of my ear.  His tongue is warm enough, but the saliva he leaves behind makes my skin crawl.  

Whatever.  I don’t really care.

“’M not asking you to treat me nice,” I say, because I’m not.  Nothing about ‘nice’ appeals to me anymore.  It’s just hollow promises hidden by layers of bullshit.

He laughs again, humping me like a dog.  “I like you,” he says, biting my neck.  I throw my head back and laugh before meeting him for a sloppy kiss.

God, it’s almost too easy.

\---

It doesn’t take much more hypersexual writhing and requests for another drink, please before Drunk Prick slides his hands up the back of my shirt and breathes “My place or yours?” into my mouth before another heavy kiss with too much tongue.  I say his, because even just the thought of letting this horny ball of fucks into Jim’s bed is enough to make me want to skin him alive and piss all over the exposed flesh before pulling his teeth out with pliers.

“What’s your name?” he finally asks, deciding that he might as well make an effort to get to know me a little before stabbing me over and over again with his love stick.  Apparently the best time to ask for this unimportant detail was during a rough, over-the-pants groping session in a taxi cab.

“Um, Bailey,” I decide.  It was Fletcher last time, and Quinn before that. 

“Nice to meet you, Bailey,” Drunk Prick croons.  “I’m Tyler.”

“I don’ care,” I slur, my hands halfheartedly fumbling at his belt buckle.  “’m jus gonna call you Daddy.”

“Where have you been all my life?” Drunk Prick (Tyler? Drunk Prick) breathes, his words sculpted with a religious reverence.  He cups the side of my face and leans in to kiss me again, and I hold my breath and let him.  This is what I wanted, after all.

\---

We stumble into his apartment, narrowly missing the pile of unorganized shoes sitting in the walkway.  In seconds, his hands are on me and he is pushing me up against the wall, tearing my shirt off.  “Don’t be too loud,” he moans against my lips.  “Don’t wanna wake Brian.”

I lift my eyebrow in a question I’m not really asking.  “Roommate,” he explains, rolling his eyes.  “Guess it doesn’t really matter if he hears, should be used to it by now.”

“Charming,” I mutter, too drunk to stop the word from spilling out.  Luckily, Drunk Prick is too horny to notice: he fumbles at my belt while pulling me towards his bedroom and muttering about just doing it in the hallway instead.

His room is messy, but I didn’t expect much.  There’s a forgotten bowl of cereal on the dresser next to a just-as forgotten condom.  I push him against his door and peel his shirt off while muttering something about wanting him to fuck me until I’m raw; seconds later, we are mostly naked, writhing on his bed.

“Wan’ you ‘n my mouth,” I say, the words sort of just falling out of my mouth.  I certainly don’t mean them, but it doesn’t matter, certainly not now. 

“Perfect,” Drunk Prick mutters.  “We’ll use your saliva as lube.” 

I lie obediently against the mattress and focus all my energies into not grimacing while he crawls up the bed and more or less shoves his cock in my mouth.  I choke initially—it’s pretty big, and I wasn’t prepared—before steadying my breathing and focusing on massaging the shaft with my tongue as best I can.

“That’s it,” he coos, running a hand through my hair and looking down at me like I’m some sort of pet.  He grips the headboard and starts rocking his hips, causing me to choke again.  I try to say something, make him slow down, but all that escapes is a short whine that only seems to spur him on. 

“Oh yeah, good boy,” he says, tugging at my hair sharply enough to draw tears.  “It’s so good when you moan like that.” 

Fuck.  I wrap my hands around his thighs, dig my fingers into them—nothing.  Fuck.  Too rough.  Fuck.  I can take it, I’ve done it before, it just—fuck.  I won’t be able to talk tomorrow, not that it matters. 

Finally I get through to him by slapping his thighs.  “What’s the matter?” he asks, reluctantly pulling his cock out of his mouth.

“Was just thinkin’ if we keep going like this, you won’ be able t’ fuck me proper,” I mutter, pulling myself up from under him and running a hand down his ugly nothing forgettable body that doesn’t belong to Jim.  Not Jim, never Jim.  Fuck.

“That what you want, babe?” he asks.  His cock twitches with anticipation.

No, it’s not what I want.  It’s not what I fucking want.  I’m drunk and miserable and my insides have been scraped away and I want to pull my brother from the ground and take him back to his—our—home and curl up and die with him but I can’t, I can’t.  It’s too late for things like that. 

But I’m an actor.  A liar by profession.  And I’ve lied to myself: told myself that I can keep out the loneliness one night at a time by seeking out warm flesh.  I don’t fucking believe it, not anymore, but fuck—if I can sell that lie to this man, this pathetic, sad thing just as lonely as me—then it’s true.  For twenty minutes, anyway. 

So I look him with false lust in my eyes and lean in and whisper damning words against his lips, consequences be fucked.  This is who I am now.

“Though’ that was the deal.  Daddy.”

This is who I am.


	7. Leash

“I love you,” Jim whispers, his breath warm on my ear.  “So, so much.”

“I—I know,” I stutter, so overwhelmed with love that I can’t think, much less speak, straight.  “I love you. I love you, Jamie.”

It could be any moment with us.  Our eighth birthday, when Da forgot about us after one too many drinks and we hid in our closet to keep ourselves safe; the day we first moved into our own apartment and stayed up until three in the morning, kissing and fucking in a bed that was finally our own; a thousand Valentine’s Days, filled with stolen kisses hidden from eyes quick to damn us to Hell.  The night before he died.

This moment is set apart by the bite on his neck, the one I didn’t leave.  It fills the space between us, keeps me from touching him.  I love him.  He is my brother and I love him, and yet—something is off.  Wrong. 

“Why?” 

There’s no point in asking.  Jim does this sometimes—leaves in the evening and crawls back in the space between morning and night and curls up next to me while I sleep.  When I wake, I am in his arms and he smells like the man (men?) who fucked him the night before. 

It’s fine.  _Fine._   Jim can do what he wants.

“Richie.”  His voice breaks.  He holds his arms open for me, eyes pleading.  “Come here.”

I obey.  His arms wrap around me and hold me tight, so tight I can’t breathe.  Maybe this is how I die.  Strangled by my brother’s love. 

I’d be okay with that, I think.

“Richard, sometimes—I think it would be best for you if we were…well, you know.”  He pauses, looks around the room.  “Normal.”

“Normal is boring,” I reply quickly, spitting out the mantra we carved into our skin.  “Stupid.”

He shakes his head.  “Let me—no.  Who would you be, Rich, if it was just you?  If there was no me?”

“No one,” I whisper quickly.  “We’re twins, Jim, we—we need each other.  So much.  More than anything.”

Jim shakes his head again, bites his lip.  “Richard.” 

He looks at me.  In the borrowed light from the streetlamps below, his eyes are beautiful—impossibly wise.  Surely they look nothing like my own.  He opens his mouth, about to let some dark think creep out of it, and I don’t know if I am strong enough to hear it.

“Jim, you’re scaring me.”  My voice shakes with a fear I can’t identify.  I’m scared—of him, for him, I don’t know.  I think he’s leaving me.  Slowly, slowly.  Already gone.

\---

“I know, now,” I murmur, looking up at a sky of patchwork greys.  “Who I am.  Without you.”

Jim doesn’t say anything back.  I picture him staring at me, his knees brushing against mine.  Mouth quirked in that sad smile, the fake laugh like getting stabbed.  _Took you long enough._

“An empty shell.  A nothing.  And it doesn’t even matter because nothing matters, not with you gone.”

The only answer I get is a harsh February wind ripping at my hair and tugging at my scarf.  I sigh and pull my knees closer to my body to keep me warm. 

Everything in the graveyard is dead.  Dead grass and and dead trees and dead flowers on graves of dead men.  It’s fitting, then.  That I’m here. 

Here, finally, my brother dead for months.  I tell myself—tell him—that I couldn’t come, not before, not after the funeral I couldn’t even help plan.  Coming back would make it real.  Final. 

He made it final when he stuck the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. 

I stare at the gravestone: a small thing, easily overlooked.  Black marble, I think.  Elegant, indiscreet—just like him, hiding in plain sight on the London streets, dressed in Westwood, his handkerchief still stained from his last kill.  The blood still under his fingernails.  I hated it then but want it now, that subtle murder.  Would kill for it.

Wouldn’t that make him laugh.  Mouth crinkled up: beautiful, insincere.  _My, look how far we’ve come_.

I hate the inscription on the grave: _James Brook, 1976-2012.  Never forgotten._   Sebastian’s words, not mine.  I don’t even know how he knew about the name my brother threw away; don’t want to know. 

I know why he did it: wanted to keep the grave a secret.  _Here lies Jim Moriarty, king of the underground_ , wouldn’t that be something to see.  A proper remembrance.  Wouldn’t be bor-ring, stupid, normal. 

There are flowers on the grave.  Red roses, withered.  Not mine. 

I don’t know what I’m doing here, not really.  I wanted to pray for him, to rest my soul as much as his (more than his?), but there hardly seems a point for either off us: he shrugged off God before he was even a decade old, and I—

I’ve spent the last month drinking and getting high and going home with strangers, sucking them off and riding their cocks and walking out the second it’s over.  I’ve overdosed with death on my mind.  I haven’t gone to Confession since two weeks after the funeral and even then, it’s not like I ever told the truth.  Never talked about the one thing that made me sicker than any of the other pathetic things in the booth before me.

That I gave my virginity to my brother when we were fifteen.  And I loved it.  Loved it when he worked me open with fingers slick with our saliva and slid inside me and held my head ever so gently and kissed me on my forehead, breath soft on my skin.  Loved it because I was—am—just as bad and sick as him.  Doesn’t matter how I pretend to be different, walking around with Mam’s old rosary tucked under my clothes like it can save me from the poison in my soul.

We called it love, the thing we had.  It kept us warm at night. 

Sitting in front of his grave, praying seems so pointless— _Oh Father, who art in Heaven, if I play like I hated the way my brother’s cock felt inside me, would you let him out of Hell, pretty-please?_

Maybe Jim was right about the whole God thing.  Probably was. 

_Fuck_.  I shudder, biting back tears that no one would see anyway.  My brother is dead, ashes and dust and memories damned to fade.  And I can’t change anything about it, can’t fix it.  Prevented it, maybe.  Told him no just once, kept him from getting worse and worse.  Could have helped suck the poison out, saved us both.  Forced the medication down his throat, anything.  Anything better than doing nothing and letting him die.

Maybes don’t matter in the end. 

“I’m sorry,” I sob, choking on misery.  “That I couldn’t save you.  I’m sorry.”  My despair grows out of control, ripping me apart from the inside.  I can’t stop the crying now—the tears bleed from my eyes, freezing on my cheeks.  I bite my fingers, hoping that something physical might distract me from the ache inside.  It doesn’t fucking work, so I bite harder.  Nothing. 

I can’t escape it: can’t because I am defined by the pain left behind when my brother shot himself in the head.  Nothing I can do will distract me from that.  Not really.

So I sit there and cry.  It’s all I can do for him.

“I love you, Jamie,” I whisper. 

He doesn’t say anything back. 

\---

I sit at the grave for what feels like, and probably is, hours.  The cold starts in my cheeks and works its way down to my legs; by the time the sun starts to set, I can’t feel my hands or feet and can’t bring myself to care.

There are footsteps on the gravel path behind me: heavy, methodical.  They don’t matter much; I’ve heard footsteps all day, was even approached by a woman in her early fifties who heard me crying and felt obligated to rest her hand on my shoulder and murmur “there, there” like she was talking to a child before continuing on her way.  So I don’t expect much from these footsteps, either, unless they’re the groundskeeper, telling me to get out and come back tomorrow.

Maybe I’ll just die in front of him and he’ll let me stay.

The footsteps edge closer, coming to a stop behind me.  “Fancy seeing you here,” their owner says in a voice made rough from too many cigarettes.  Sebastian, then.

“Don’t know what you mean,” I lie.  My voice is harsher than it should be for what he said, but I don’t care.  He kept me from dying when it was all I wanted; if he’s expecting kindness or even tolerance, he won’t find it here.

“Yes you do,” he says.  He sounds tired, worn out.  “Haven’t bothered to make it out here, have you?”

“Haven’t been able to,” I respond.  “There’s a difference.”

Sebastian scoffs, almost like Jim would have, if he were still alive.  “Is there?” 

He sits next to me, his too-big legs encroaching on my space.  There’s another bouquet of roses in his hands.  Infuriating.

“He hated roses,” I say, the change in subject intentional.  I know he knows I can’t win his little who-put-in-more-effort game, so fuck it.  Pin him against a wall, see how he likes it.

He shrugs, breathes out.  His breath escapes in a cloud and slips upwards, untouchable.  “I know.  Complained they were cliché.  Figured a bouquet of severed fingers might get me arrested.”

His remark catches me off guard and I find myself laughing in spite of my hate for this man.  “He would have liked that,” I concede, shaking my head to wipe the smile off.

“I know he would.”  Sebastian lays the flowers down, picking up the dead ones.  “There you go, Boss,” he whispers.  His words are too tender for my liking.

“So.  What have you been…”  I trail off, my instincts trying to keep me from forming a cordial sentence towards this man.  If he’s here, I might as well, I guess.

“Up to?”  He finishes the sentence for me, glancing my way with eyes less cold than before.  He might be warming up to me. 

Eww. 

“Freelance work when I can get it.  I made a deal with the government a while back, information for our protection and all.  So the network’s mostly gone.”  He shrugs.  “Which is…fine, I guess.  Would have disappeared eventually, without him.”

“ _Our_ protection?” I ask, eyebrows raised.  I was no one, as far as Jim’s work was concerned.  It didn’t make any sense.

Sebastian snorts.  “MI5 wanted to take you in for…questioning, you being his brother and all.  Took forever and five security cameras to convince them you didn’t know anything.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, waving a hand lazily.  “I took them down when you…you know.  They trusted you by then.  Well, I say trusted.”

I pause, taking in the information as best I can.  The implication of his words are alien:  I can’t believe all this could happen just outside the edge of my consciousness, circling, never quite touching.

“Oh,” I say finally.

“Yeah.”

We lapse into an uncomfortable silence.  I keep waiting for him to get up and walk away, but he doesn’t: he just sits there, staring at the grave with this faraway look in his eyes.

“So.  What kind of work did you do for him?” I ask.  I don’t know why I bother.  He meant something to Jim, I guess.  Maybe.  Maybe he didn’t.  Doesn’t hurt to find out.

Sebastian chuckles at my ignorance, a deep, throaty rumble.  “Fuck, he kept you in the dark.  I was his sniper,” he says, turning and staring at me like the words are supposed to mean something.

They don’t, of course, so I stare back at him with dead eyes.  The nothingness in my reaction unnerves or perhaps offends him (or maybe it just reminds himself of someone he used to know, someone with a bullet in their brain), so he continues.  “I killed men from half a mile away just because he asked.  Did other stuff, too.  Bodyguarding, intimidation.  Whatever he wanted, really.”

_Whatever he wanted._ Those words—they stick in my head, eating away.  I know what it means to do whatever Jim wanted.  Know the price that comes with it.  For the first time, I wonder if the scars on his face are accidents.

“And you…” I pause, trying to find the right words.  His eyes are on me.  “Slept with him.”

“So did you,” he mutters.  His voice is softer than it should be.  He must have come to terms with it long ago—just accepted that Jim was sick and the things he did with me weren’t going to stop until one of us died.  The hold he had on me—

If anyone could ever understand it, it would be this man.  

“It’s getting late,” he mutters, staring at the sky.  “How long have you been out here?”

I shrug.  “Dunno.  Couple hours.  Maybe more.”

Sebastian’s head whips around, eyes flaring like he’s going to lose his temper before calming again, head shaking.  “Come on, we’re leaving.”

“Why?”

“I’m checking you for frostbite,” he says, getting on his feet and holding a hand out for me.  “Fuck, can’t trust a Moriarty to take care of itself, can you,” he mutters, eyes rolling.

“I’m not him, you know,” I mutter, looking distastefully at the extended hand.  “You’re not getting paid to take care of me.”

Sebastian smirks before leaning down and grabbing my arm, pulling me up with him.  I stagger, my feet numb and unsure of how to stand.  I’d probably fall back down without him.

“He told me to protect you before he died.  And I’m not one to disobey an order from…” He quiets for a moment, furrowing his brow.  “From a superior.”    

“Besides,” he continues, “how will you hold the shots you trick other men into buying for you if your fingers fall off?”

I snort, grasping for something clever to shoot back.  When nothing comes, I mutter a few choice phrases to myself and stumble after.  The silver lining of the cold is that my cheeks are already so red that he can’t see me flush. 

He wins this round, I guess.

\---

Sebastian’s apartment is not what I expected.  It’s neat enough, nothing out of place—Jim would have liked that.  But it doesn’t look like anyone actually _lives_ here.  It’s blank, untouched: white walls and empty cabinets and closets filled with little but clothes and guns.

He drags me to the bathroom and pulls out a first aid kit before telling me to take off my shoes and my gloves.  I obey, too distracted to keep up my wall of pretentiousness.  Pulling the gloves off reveals skin as white as Jim’s when I saw him in the casket.  Dead.

He gently takes my hands in his, his eyebrows scrunched up in concern he shouldn’t feel.  His hands are so warm they feel like they’re burning my skin.  “Can you move your fingers at all?” he asks.  This close to him, I can hear the rumble of his voice coming from deep inside his body, brewing like a storm.

“Um.  I think so,” I say, wiggling my fingers and toes as best I can.  It hurts but it isn’t impossible.

“Good,” he mutters, inspecting my hands further before issuing a verdict.  “It’s not frostbite.  You got lucky this time.”

“Luck of the Irish, huh?”

Sebastian snorts.  “Dunno. I want you to soak your hands and feet in warm water before you leave though, get everything back up to temperature.”  He lets go of my hands and moves towards the bath tub, letting the water run.

“You sure you aren’t just trying to get my clothes off?” I ask, moving to unbutton my coat.  When what I actually just said to him registers, I instantly recoil, my face scrunching up at my own mistake before I remember that this is what I do now.  Flirt with people to get them to do things for me.  Buy me drinks; whatever.  It has nothing to do with _him_.

“Positive,” he scoffs, moving towards the door.  “Go ahead and use my towel.  Holler if you need anything.”

Then he’s gone.  I finish pulling off my clothes and step into the tub with shaky feet.  The water is wonderfully warm, and I sink down into it, my knees forced to bend to accommodate the size of the small tub.

I flex my fingers and toes in the warmth of the water, slowly resuscitating them.  I haven’t sat in a bath like this since Jim and I were children.  He used to pour half the bubble solution into the water as the tub was filling and we would sculpt castles out of the foam.

Thinking about that—I can’t.  Need to shove it aside for another day.  But there’s nothing in the bathroom to distract my wandering mind; the room is as sparse as the rest of the house, white everywhere.  Sebastian didn’t even have the decency to pick a different color for his towels.

I don’t understand him.  When we met at the funeral, he wanted me dead.  Since then, he kept me alive when I should have died; now he’s taken me home on an overprotective impulse just to make sure my _fingers_ are fine.  Outside the bathroom, I hear him moving around his kitchen—making something for us to eat, maybe.  Fuck if I know why he’d bother.

Then there’s the words in the graveyard, the ones that stuck to my skin.  _Whatever he wanted_.  This man—striking, strong, with hands made for snapping necks…nothing about him suggests the capacity to bow.  To be tamed; a tiger on a leash.  Improbable, and yet—he belonged to my brother.  Did anything for him.  Was his property.

And Jim and I always had a way of keeping things in the family.


End file.
